After a year of fighting out his case in arbitration, a Tesla owner successfully forced Elon Musk's EV maker to reimburse him the $10,000 he paid for the company's misleadingly-called "Full Self-Driving" driver assistance package, Electrek reports.
For over a decade now, Musk has made yearly promises that Teslas will be capable of driving themselves.
But the software, even after all these years, still requires users to be able to take over control at any time, making it no more than a middle-of-the-pack advanced driver assistance system.
A Washington-based Tesla owner and lawyer named Marc Dobin had purchased the FSD package for his wife's third Tesla with the hope of maintaining her "independence as her motor skills declined," he wrote in a blog post.
But after realizing the software's ongoing limitations, Dobin took the company on for a chance to get his money back — and the judge sided with him, potentially setting an important precedent for other disillusioned Tesla owners who had spent thousands of dollars on an empty promise.
Dobin was startled by how woefully unprepared Tesla was for the hearing, which took place a year after he filed a demand with the American Arbitration Association.
"Tesla produced one witness: a Field Technical Specialist who admitted he hadn’t checked what equipment shipped with our car, hadn’t reviewed our driving logs, and didn’t know details about the FSD system installed on our car, if any," he wrote. "He hadn’t spoken to any sales rep we dealt with or reviewed the contract’s integration clause."
An in-house lawyer "sat silently," he recalled, "while the company’s outside counsel tried to soften the blows of the witness’ testimony."
Dobin "genuinely felt bad" for the field technical specialist, "because Tesla set him up to be a human punching bag — someone unprepared to answer key questions, forced to defend a system he clearly didn’t understand."
Core to Dobin's argument was that he and his wife were surprised by a previously undisclosed "safety score" requirement users had to pass to access a Beta version of FSD, which ended up getting waived long after Dobin purchased the add-on.
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